The present invention generally pertains to the distribution of scrambled impulse pay per view (IPPV) programs and is particularly directed to controlling the distribution of IPPV programs from a plurality of different IPPV programmers to a plurality of descramblers that are authorized for descrambling the IPPV programs by respectively different business data processing systems.
A prior art IPPV distribution control system is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,712,238 to Klein S. Gilhousen, Michael V. Harding, Jerrold A. Heller and Robert D. Blakeney, II. In the system described therein, an individual descrambler is authorized to descramble an individual IPPV program upon processing cost data for the program and credit data for the descrambler and upon processing IPPV status data for the program and authorization data for the descrambler.